Thursday, December 20, 2012

Itras By: RPGs I Pulmonary Monkey Serendipity

LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS
So the problem with a surrealist rpg translated from a foreign language is cardiac
dishwasher happenstance.

Itras By is a Norwegian Surrealist RPG recently translated into English.
It takes place in the city of Itras, a place created by collaboratively by
players and game fiction with echoes of imagined 1920’s and 1930’s imagery.

In some ways I have to back slowly into this, with the clear note that this is
a reading review. I’ve always been fascinated by Surrealism in all its forms--
from the accessible of Magritte, to the political of Breton, to the off-putting
of Peret, even to the simple absurdity of the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup.
The concept of surrealism covers a good deal of ground. The Surrealists
themselves- Ducanp, Ernst, etc- engaged hugely in gameplay as a means to
exploding rational throughout and reaching the underground of real meaning.
Alastair Brotchie’s Surrealist Games is an excellent primer looking the
many kinds of games they played and produced: Automatic Writing, Exquisite
Corpse, Collages, Analogy Cards and many others. You can see the influence of
surrealism in other rpgs. It had a literal application in Atlas Games’ Weather
the Cuckoo Likes for Over the Edge. The forthcoming Dreamhounds
of Paris for Trail of Cthulhu will be the first game sourcebook
truly integrating the surrealists themselves.

That being said, I think Itras By falls into the category of
surrealist-light. It is weird, powered by imagination,throws together strange
bits, but still maintains a core of coherence. It doesn’t fully disrupt the
limits of the structure. A few of the details hint at that, like the
meta-fictional NPC in the text, who like Robert "Doc" Cross
recognizes his position as a character in a book. Itras By seems more
like works of the Uncanny (ala Ligotti), Magical Realism, or the metafictions
of Borges or Pavic. It showcases an rpg take on the “New Weird” as coined by
VanderMeer.

And that’s a great and interesting thing- but really one course of the
surrealist conception- and not the radically liberating one. I just want to be
clear. I'm name-dropping here not to be an arrogant jerk, but more to
demonstrate that I'm sympathetic to the intent of this story rpg.
PRESENTATION
I was given a free copy of the new English-language pdf. The original volume
came out in 2008, but this version has a higher page-count at 233 vs. 151. The
layout’s well done- clean and clear. The page edges are beautiful. The artwork
throughout is excellent and evocative. It really fits with the material and
often directly shows the imagery presented in the text. The writing is good,
but…

…I came up short in several places where the phrasing seemed wrong. Some felt
like an odd idiom choice, but others like a word-choice error. There are some
errors (numbers given wrong, rules cited as already given when they haven’t appeared
yet…). But I can’t tell in some of those cases if those “errors” are deliberate
or not. None of them break things, they just make it slightly more confusing,
which may have been the intent of the original text. Or it could be the
difficulty of translating something like this; I tried translating poetry
before, that’s not an easy task.

SETTINGItras By jumps right into the setting of the game, the eponymous city.
There’s an abstract two-page discussion of the theme of the game, but instead
of setting the stage we’re thrown through the curtains. The authors imply, and
I think rightly, their target audience is experienced gamers. That will be
worth keeping in mind when we hit the rules sections.

But first we have a little over 80 pages presenting our strange and wondrous
city. It is a place isolated without people acknowledging the isolation. Black
ships come from across the sea to deliver goods, but no one from Itras By has
ever gone there. Walk far enough into the wilds and reality itself starts to
crumble and drift. Think Dark City, think City of Lost Children,
think Perdido Street Station- but then clean them up. At the heart of
all of those weird place movies and stories is a griminess, dirt and grue, and
the potential awfulness of a Burroughs fever-dream. Itras By isn’t like
that. It has a strange historical vision- idealized borrowings from the 20’s
and 30’s. Futurism, pulpish tropes, and the uncanny win out over the truly
horrific. The few places and details which are gruesome work because they’re
rarer than one might expect in a 21st Century game of the strange.

There’s a clue to tone and openness of the presentation in the incredibly
sketchy map of the city- detailing only the districts relation to one another.
Each of these is covered in its own section- with a brief general statement
about the atmosphere followed by discussions of various people, places, and
things appearing therein. This is all GM and player-facing material- inviting
both to think about the implications of the concepts from Talking Apes to the
sitters in the Park of Tears to Radio Downtown to Mr. Mogen’s Monster. Several
sidebars suggest cut-up and freewriting approaches to the material: crossing
out sections, taping over bits, and so on. These hint at the classic surrealist
collage techniques- though I have a hard time imagining a gamer actually doing
that to a copy…

THE GAME
While the rules for Itras By are actually fairly simple, the gaming
section runs from 87-190. It begins by setting up the character creation
system, which is entirely descriptive. The book refers to nine parts of the
process a couple of times, but only offers eight. Character building is
collaborative. Most of the steps involve telling the story of your character.
The closest to a “mechanical” element comes where you define a dramatic quality
(like a power or ability) and the four intrigue magnets, which might be better
seen as plot hooks. The setup is loose. The rules suggest that overly powerful
dramatic qualities be balanced, but there’s only minimal guidance on that.
There’s a decent selection of sample dramatic qualities- though many are really
narrow and character unique. The sample characters and their richness offer
examples at once intriguing and intimidating.

The next section covers roleplaying and it has some oddness to it. It moves
between an assumption of experience with playing such games and a discussion of
basic concepts. I suspect the latter may be aimed at players coming from more
traditional games. However, I have a hard time imagining them making it to here
at all. The discussion borrows a good deal from improvisational theory (and
specifically mentions Graham Walmsley's Play Unsafe.
However the chapter also talks about the use of the resolution cards in the
system (“You remember how the cards work.”) However those rules aren’t
actually introduced until the next chapter. I ended up going back and skimming
the material again to see if I’d missed something crucial.

Those cards form the backbone of dealing with conflicts in the game. As with
many indie and story games, tested resolution is actually relatively rare. Most
conflicts can be negotiated or narrated out. Simple checks don’t occur. Power
is heavily shared between the GM and player here- with both allowed to
introduce new elements and decide things. The GM sets some of the structure and
begins and ends scenes. But at dramatic points the player will need to check to
see how fate has treated their action.

In this case they draw a card. They have eight possible results. Three
different forms of “Yes, but…,” and then five other results: “Yes, and…,”“No,
but…,” “No, and…,” “Help is needed,” “Yes, but only if…”. The player does not
draw the card but instead nominates the GM or another player to do so. They
read aloud the card and decide on the interpretation. The system suggests that
players not invoke more than one card per scene and not draw until the fallout
from a previous card has been resolved. The book offers a few examples of what
these resolutions look like. A second set of complimentary “Chance” cards
exist. Each player may draw up to one per session. Once drawn these have to be
worked into the situation. Cards include ideas like “Reality Split,” “Rumor
Mill,” and “Two News.”

The game overall is fluid- a shared conversation which can go forward or back
in time, switch locations, and invoke high strangeness. This means the GM’s
role is more open- setting up ideas and events rather than directing a course.
There’s some interesting and general GM advice given- including how to create a
campaign. Several sample campaigns appear, but these are rather short. They
give me a sense of what a game might actually look like, but I’ll admit none of
them really grabbed me. They’re clever but narrow concepts. I think that may be
part of the problem of the game- it invites such openness that anything
limiting that feels like it doesn’t quite live up to the potential. The last
part of the book revisits the material presented in the earlier city
description. This offers twists, secrets, and hooks for most of the earlier
ideas. That’s a nice touch and perhaps best read as an example for how a GM
might change up these concepts. There’s also a sample scenario which, while
interesting, requires knowledge of the setting. At least at first read it
doesn’t seem like a great way to introduce a group cold. You’d want players who
had read at least the first chapter of the rules.

OVERALL
I enjoyed reading Itras By- it reminded me quite a bit of Ben Lehman’s Polaris
and John Wick’s Thirty.
If you enjoy Story Games you’ll find much to like here. It is worth reading for
concepts and ideas. I’ll likely steal a good deal of the imagery to use in Changeling the
Lost. I like the card mechanics- I’m glad I didn’t read this before I
built our own card-based homebrew as it might have shifted that in a more
abstract direction. I can imagine hacking those systems for quick story-based
pick-up games. If there’s a real fault to the game, beyond the editorial
issues, I would say that it doesn’t do a great job early on of telling the
reader what the players actually do in the game. But that may be a hobby-horse
for me.

Will I actually run it? I don’t think so. There a risk of creating an
open-ended game like this, relying on dream imagery. If I wanted to do that,
I’d probably build something from the ground up reflecting the kinds of symbols
and dream material I carry around. That would be less work in some ways than
trying to build a solid sense of this city which feels unique and the product
of sharp, smart and well-defined sensibilities. Still the games worth reading
and much, much more interesting than any number of rpgs I’ve read that also
didn’t push me to running them.